Department of Political Science, Aarhus University.
Psychol Sci. 2017 Dec;28(12):1857-1863. doi: 10.1177/0956797617728270. Epub 2017 Oct 19.
A range of studies have demonstrated that people implicitly treat out-groups as the carriers of pathogens and that considerable prejudice against out-groups is driven by concerns about pathogens. Yet the psychological categories that are involved and the selection pressures that underlie these categories remain unclear. A common view is that human pathogen-avoidance psychology is specifically adapted to avoid out-groups because of their potentially different pathogens. However, the series of studies reported here shows that there is no dedicated category for reasoning about out-groups in terms of pathogens. Specifically, a memory-confusion experiment conducted with two large-scale samples of Americans (one nationally representative) yielded strong, replicable evidence that healthy out-group members are represented using the same psychological category that is used to represent manifestly infected in-group members. This suggests that the link between out-group prejudice and pathogen concerns is a by-product of general mechanisms for treating any unfamiliar appearance as an infection cue.
一系列研究表明，人们会潜意识地将外群体视为病原体的携带者，并且对外群体的相当大的偏见是由对病原体的担忧驱动的。然而，涉及的心理类别和这些类别的选择压力仍然不清楚。一种常见的观点是，人类的病原体回避心理是专门为避免外群体而适应的，因为它们可能携带不同的病原体。然而，这里报告的一系列研究表明，没有专门的类别用于根据病原体来推理外群体。具体来说，一项在两个大规模的美国样本（一个具有全国代表性）中进行的记忆混淆实验得出了强有力的、可重复的证据，表明健康的外群体成员使用与用于表示明显感染的内群体成员相同的心理类别来表示。这表明，外群体偏见与病原体担忧之间的联系是将任何不熟悉的外表视为感染线索的一般机制的副产品。
